Into the Storm

Synopsis

In the span of a single day, the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes. The entire town is at the mercy of the erratic and deadly cyclones, even as storm trackers predict the worst is yet to come. Most people seek shelter, while others run towards the vortex, testing how far a storm chaser will go for...

Production Details

Synopsis

In the span of a single day, the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes. The entire town is at the mercy of the erratic and deadly cyclones, even as storm trackers predict the worst is yet to come. Most people seek shelter, while others run towards the vortex, testing how far a storm chaser will go for that once-in-a-lifetime shot.

Production Details

Run Time

1 hr. 29 min.

In Theaters

Friday, August 08, 2014-Nationwide

MPAA Rating

(PG-13), for sequences of intense destruction and peril, and language including some sexual references

Into the Storm

Here's the sole compliment I will pay Into the Storm: it let's you know right away what you're getting into. The very first minute of the movie introduces fans to the sort of grim, nihilistic, aesthetically repugnant and substantially barren horror that maintains throughout the hour and a half to follow, saving only the extent of its special effects for later… and trust me, it's not worth the wait.

While we've been debating the toxicity of "destruction porn" since before Man of Steel, but surely we can point to entries in the disaster genre that don't feel like soul-mincing works of large scale snuff - we can point to this summer's Godzilla, for instance. But for every thematically dense project like the aforesaid, we have a half-dozen Into the Storms: movies that, somehow, pass off the most mangled constructions of mindless, banal, uninspired, grotesque unpleasantness as entertainment.

We are asked to believe that there are characters in this movie: Richard Armitage insists that he's a father of two, a disappointingly joke-free Matt Walsh tells us that he's a storm chaser and a documentarian, and Sarah Wayne Callies introduces herself as a meteorologist of some kind. But we never get more than a résumé recitation from each character; we never earn an understanding of what any of them would do when faced with mortal danger, what they would think about, who they would want to be with.

So, really, we're not given much of a story. Sure, there are tidbits mentioned about Armitage's strained relationship with his two sons (Max Deacon and Nathan Kress), about Walsh's obsessive devotion to his work, about Callies' desire to make it home to her five-year-old daughter (ugh, the pandering). But these don't feel like character beats, but rather like bits of data. Nothing within these characters exists beyond what we are explicitly told about them. As such, they wind up feeling less like people to whom we're anchored and more like chunks of debris being tossed around between tornadoes.

And that's what's so ugly, unenjoyable, and dangerous about this movie: it's dehumanizing. It prefers the thrills of demolition to the pathos inherent in accessing what this demolition might be doing to real people. But even in its misguided mission does Into the Storm fail: it's not thrilling. Not fun. Not cool to look at. It is, in all conceivable ways, a disaster.

TOP ANTICIPATED

MovieTickets.com is a worldwide leader in advance movie ticketing and a top destination for news, celebrity interviews, movie reviews and trailers. You can also access theater information, check movie showtimes, view video clips, and much more.